Hundreds of thousands of people from all continents visit Dachau Memorial Site each year. Any visitor to the Memorial Site will find that the Memorial Site bookshop stocks two publications worthy of particular mention, both deal at length with the history of the former concentration camp; Stanislav Zamecnik's ,outstanding, That Was Dachau and the superb Catalogue for the Exhibition: The Dachau Concentration Camp edited by Barbara Distel. Notwithstanding, there is little, recently written a...

During a 1931 trial of four Nazi stormtroopers, known as the Eden Dance Palace trial, Hans Litten grilled Hitler in a brilliant and merciless three-hour cross-examination, forcing him into multiple contradictions and evasions and finally reducing him to helpless and humiliating rage (the transcription of Hitler's full testimony is included.) At the time, Hitler was still trying to prove his embrace of legal methods, and distancing himself from his stormtroopers. The courageous Litten revea...

This is a unique, eye-witness account of everyday life right at the heart of the Nazi extermination machine.Slomo Venezia was born into a poor Jewish-Italian community living in Thessaloniki, Greece. At first, the occupying Italians protected his family; but when the Germans invaded, the Venezias were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and sisters disappeared on arrival, and he learned, at first with disbelief, that they had almost certainly been gassed. Given the chance to earn a l...

This “scrupulous and honest” (Washington Post) history of the most notorious concentration camp of the Holocaust preserves the authentic voices of survivors and perpetratorsThe largest mass murder in human history took place in World War II at Auschwitz. Yet its story is not fully known. In Auschwitz, Laurence Rees reveals new insights from more than 100 original interviews with survivors and Nazi perpetrators who speak on the record for the first...

Barbara Cherish's upbringing in Nazi-occupied Poland was one of relative wealth and comfort. But her father's senior position in the Nazi Party meant that she and her brothers and sisters lived on a knife edge. In 1943 he became commandant of perhaps the most infamous of all the concentration camps: Auschwitz.The author tells her father's story with clarity and without judgement, detailing his relationship with his family and his unceasing love for his mistress, as...

**Winner of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize"A superb and immensely important book."—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington PostThe Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years...**The end of World War II in Europe is remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, but the reality was quite different. Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed, and more than thirty mil...

‘Helen Lewis survived the greatest nightmare ever dreamed by man. Her story is appalling, mesmerising, and one reads with increasing gratitude for her clarity, honesty and courage.’ Ian McEwanHelen Lewis, a young student of dance in Prague at the outbreak of WW2 was herded, like Madeleine Albright, into the Terezin ghetto, then shipped to Auschwitz, in 1942. Separated from her family, she struggled to survive amidst the carnage of The Final Solution. How she did so, and what she di...

"...an important personal and historic document... Gracefully written... a triumph of the human spirit... a universal message."-- Prof. Emeritus Michael Kerestesi, Wayne State UniversityMore than a Holocaust survivor memoir. More than just a harrowing tale of survival and hope. What makes this story special is its unique three-dimensional depth. A retired Rabbi and educator, the author masterfully weaves personal memoir into historical context, with a deep appreciation for J...

"The Beautiful Beast" documents in meticulous detail the extraordinary and frightening biography of Irma Grese. Born in a tiny farming community fifty miles north of Berlin, she became the ultimate feminine representative of the Hitlerian vision of the warrior-youth;indeed, with her blonde hair and strikingly blue eyes, Grese embodied all the physical characteristics of the idealized Nazi youth! Once Irma Grese was old enough to secure a training spot in the newly-created corps of female S...

Holocaust survivor HENRY MELNICK was born in Lodz, Poland. Shortly after the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939, he was sent to do slave labour in the Nowy Sacz and Tarnow Ghettos and at Szebnie camp. He was then transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buna, Dora-Mittelbau and Bergen-Belsen death camps. When his parents were murdered in the Belzec death camp, he became the sole survivor of his entire family.After liberation, Henry volunteered for the Israeli Army and fought for Israel's inde...

The Nazis tried to destroy Inge's life--but they could not break her spirit.Inge Auerbacher's childhood was as happy and peaceful as any other German child's--until 1942. By then, the Nazis were in power, and because Inge's family was Jewish, she and her parents were sent to a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. The Auerbachers defied death for three years, and were finally freed in 1945. In her own words, Inge Auerbacher tells her family's harrowing story--and how they carried w...

From the author of Children of the Camps, a look at the disturbing activities of the Kempeitai, Japan's feared military and secret police.The book opens by explaining the origins, organization, and roles of the Kempeitai apparatus, which exercised virtually unlimited power throughout the Japanese Empire. Author Mark Felton reveals their criminal and collaborationist networks that extorted huge sums of money from hapless citizens and businesses. They ran the...